Richard Collins: Pangolin is the fall guy for our killer pandemic

Has the world’s most trafficked wild animal taken revenge on its persecutors? The Chinese, it’s said, ‘eat everything with four legs, except the table, and anything with wings, except aeroplanes’. It’s not a fair comment; wild creatures were not eaten willy-nilly in China traditionally.

The eating of ‘bush meat’ is probably a legacy of the famines inflicted on the country during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

To meet today’s demand, wild and domestic creatures are kept cheek by jowl in ‘wet’ markets, where rogue viruses can ‘jump’ between species. Bats seem to have been the original hosts of the virus which became Covid-19.

To infect humans in the teeming Wuhan market, an intermediate host was needed. Initial protein analyses implicated a species of snake. However, Chinese researchers now think that pangolins were the link.

Protein sequences found in the lungs of sick pangolins, smuggled from Malaysia, were 91% identical to those in the lethal virus.

It seems that the illegal exploitation of pangolins, forbidden under CITES, the convention outlawing trade in endangered species, is partly to blame for the current global catastrophe.

Pangolins resemble small flesh-eating dinosaurs with long necks stretched forward and tails extending backwards for balance. Males, fighting over access to females, can use the tails as clubs.

Depending on the species, individuals measure between 30cm and 100cm from nose to tip of tail. Eating ants and termites, pangolins have no teeth but their tongues are as long as their bodies.

Like the fly-papers that used hang in Irish kitchens, the tongue is layered with sticky saliva to trap insect prey. Pangolins swallow small stones, forming gizzards to grind down their food.

Covered from head to toe in overlapping scaly plates, pangolins are paranoid about security.

Shy and nocturnal, they hide and are seldom seen. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘pangolin’ is a Malay word meaning ‘one who rolls up’.

Like a hedgehog, a frightened ant-eater rolls itself into a ball, resembling a scaly pine-cone. A mother warps herself around her baby.

The armour, which probably evolved as protection from ant stings, is said to withstand even the bite of a lion.

The sharpness of the scales gives extra security, the encrusted tail can inflict a nasty wound and a skunk-like stench provides additional defence.

Upper-class Chinese impress business colleagues by offering them expensive pangolin dishes. But pangolins aren’t just killed for the table. Like tigers, slaughtered for their body parts, and rhinos for their horns, these ant-eaters are taken for their scales, used as medicine.

According to the bogus Doctrine of Signatures, a creature’s unique feature is a clue to its medical use.

Scales suggest a remedy for skin ailments but, like hair and fingernails, the plates are composed of keratin. There is no evidence of medicinal value whatsoever.

How ironic that a feature which evolved for to provide security became the pangolin’s Achilles’ heel!

Three of the world’s eight pangolin species are now deemed ‘critically endangered’, a further three are ‘endangered’ and two are ‘vulnerable’.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, at least a million pangolins have been trafficked in the last 10 years.